DVRs are great for American football and baseball. Considering there is approximately 15 minutes of actual gametime/action in a 3-4 hour baseball or football game, that's a lot of time that you can get back. A football fan spends more time watching replays than the actual game. With a DVR, you can choose to watch the replays or skip 'em.

'Real' football (ducks for cover), or Soccer, is more continuous, so it is more difficult to skip. It has around 60 minutes of gametime/action in a 2 hour broadcast, but I still DVR the matches. I'll start them a little late and then skip over halftime and the talk. I'll catch up to the 'live' game by the time the game is up. Sometimes I don't have time to watch the entire game, so I'll just skip around to watch the goals. If I do have time, I cannot properly watch 2 games at once, so one game gets DVR'd.

Sport preferences aside... I think we can all agree that the main attractive thing about watching any sport 'live' is if you're watching with a group. There's the whole socialization aspect of it that doesn't work with DVRs (outside of a quick replay). Any dead time can be spent talking about what you just saw and sharing the agony or euphoria. If you're watching alone: skip skip skip to the good bits, no one will complain!

For those in disbelief about the gametimes, google is your friend. Not intending to slam football/baseball.

My G3 had that random rebooting feature until I replaced the battery. For some reason some of the OEM ones didn't play well. I bought a non OEM one from Anker, as I recall. Since then the phone has been very reliable (speed was never an issue)

If I was a betting man, I'd put my money on the continued devolution of English, but it stays dominant due to mass media (music, video, etc). Yes it apparently continues to add new words every few minutes, but the spoken word had devolved to the point that I can hardly stand to listen to some people.

"Ummm, like, you know, we need to do something about that problem, right?"

"Yea, I was, like, gonna say something dude, but you were all..."

"Right. Like, I mean when I heard about it, it made me angry, you know?"

"An then she was, like, you know"

True stories: I was in a meeting with a guy that used "I mean" and "you know" over 100 times in 15 minutes. One stops listening to the message after being bombarded by those fillers. I have another co-worker that uses the word "essentially" as if he has to hit a quota. I'm not a perfect speaker or snobby by any means (I have my share of umms), but damn.... try to keep it simple and say what you have to say without the filler. Make your 2015 resolution to remove "like (unless comparing two things), you know, right, I mean, you know and stupid ass sayings such as "it is what it is" from your lexicon, unless the phrase is essential (damn... I used it) to the conversation. You'll be a better communicator and people may actually listen to you.
(rant off)

On the lighter side: I have a couple of like minded fellows I work with (with respect to frustrations of verbal English annoyances), and we have a game of reverse bingo going on. Bingo is if you hear a word on your corporate-speak bingo board, you mark it off. Reverse bingo is using an unusual or seldom used word (from a list of mutually agreed upon words) properly in a meeting with witnesses (at least one of the "like minded fellows"). The trick is to have it be a natural part of the conversation as if the word was the right word for the moment. Often the word is a bit obscure/seldom used and sometimes is hard to pronounce (and you catch hell if you screw it up). The funny thing is that though we've busted out words such as tenacious, juxtapose, superfluous, equivocate, analogous (an alternative to using 'like'),surreptitiously and deleterious... only ONE person has said anything or looked at us funny.

As the experiment goes on, we think folks either aren't listening or don't want to say anything to show that they don't understand us. I can say that my listening skills have improved and as such, I still shake my head at what people say versus what they wanted to communicate. One fellow told me he wanted to secularize the data (he meant segregate). Another said they were going to socialize a procedure (socialize isn't used that way). Anyhow, I'll do my part to improve the language in my small land of cubicles.

Have a happy new year, sorry for the long post and happy communicating.

I was going to reply that is was the Doctor, but someone could type faster than me. Unfortunately they didn't note that the person is the 15th Doctor's companion. "When" I'm typing this from, we're on the 15th one.
"Googletime" beta tester

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday April 23, 2010 @02:38AM
from the let's-blame-ubisoft dept.

Channard writes "As reported by Joystiq, the PS3/PlayStation Network version of Final Fight Double Impactfeatures a rather restrictive piece of digital rights management. In order to launch the game, you have to be logged into the PlayStation Network and if you're not, the game refuses to launch. This could be written off as a bug of some kind except for the fact that the error message that crops up tells you to sign in, suggesting Sony/Capcom intentionally included this 'feature.' Granted, you do have to log into the PlayStation Network to buy the title but as one commentator pointed out, logging in once does not mean you'll be logged in all the time. Curiously, the 360 version has no such restrictions, so you can play the game whether you're online or offline. But annoying as this feature may be, there may be method in Sony's madness. "

Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday March 31, 2010 @10:29PM
from the ancient-picnic-defender dept.

thomst writes "Charles Q. Choi of LiveScience reports that a farmer in southern Henan Province in China has dug up the first known ant-eating dinosaur, a half-meter-long theropod (the dinosaur family to which T. Rex belongs), whose fossilized remains were described as 'fairly intact'. The 83- to 89-million-year-old pygmy dinosaur has been named named Xixianykus zhangi by Xig Xu, De-you Wang, Corwin Sullivan, David Hone, Feng-lu Han, Rong-hao Yan, and Fu-ming Du, whose paper on the critter, A basal parvicursorine (Theropoda: Alvarezsauridae) from the Upper Cretaceous of China, was published in the March 29 issue of Zootaxa (the abstract is available in PDF format for free, the full article is paywall-protected.)"